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25 October 2016: Emergency reboots to patch “Dirty Cow” vulnerability

This is a past/expired downtime notification. The downtimes specified below have been completed, and remarks/results are given below as well.

Unless otherwise noted, all dates and times are given in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), with time in 24-hour notation.

A few hours before this post, I rebooted all servers to apply kernel updates to patch the so-called “Dirty COW” privilege escalation vulnerability in the Linux kernel. The vulnerability is indexed as CVE-2016-5195, and more information about it can be found here (with some more technical explanation here).

Due to the emergency nature of these reboots, they needed to be conducted without advance warning. I apologize for not being able to provide advance notice, and thank you for your understanding.

There is a silver lining though – since reboots needed to be performed anyway, I took advantage of them to use waiting hardware upgrades from Linode – servers minecraft1 and ridley have both now had their RAM doubled. This only added a few minutes to the downtime the reboots would have caused otherwise.

Servers affected:

phazon.fastlizard4.org

Date and time of downtime start: In the past

Duration of downtime: Minutes

Status: Completed with no issues!

Partial list of services affected:

LizardWiki

LizardNet OTRS (emails sent to OTRS during the downtime will be delivered after the downtime concludes)

LizardNet Continuous Integration (Jenkins) (Gerrit will not be able to trigger any jobs during the downtime, and they will not be run after the downtime concludes)

LizardNet Minecraft dynamic web maps

LizardIRC server emerald.lizardirc.org

LizardIRC’s website

LizardMail services on phazon.fastlizard4.org (emails sent to phazon.fastlizard4.org users during the downtime will be delivered after the downtime concludes)